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Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity: Remaking the Image in the 1960s

Matilde Nardelli

Michalangelo Antonioni’s 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema’s ‘modern’ incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni’s aesthetically audacious ... More

Michalangelo Antonioni’s 1960s films are widely recognized as both exemplars of cinema and key texts in ushering in cinema’s ‘modern’ incarnation. Reconnecting Antonioni’s aesthetically audacious films of the 1960s to the ferment of their historical time, Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity addresses these works’ crucial, yet overlooked, affinity with the new ‘impure’ art practices that emerged in the period. At the same time, the book also offers a novel reading of the films’ dialogue with postwar pictorial abstraction. Revealing an Antonioni who embraced both mixed and mass media and reflected on them via his cinema, the book, through both an intermedial and a transnational focus, replaces auteuristic accounts of the director’s work with a new understanding of its critical significance in late-twentienth century cinema and visual culture.Less

Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object

Matthew C. Hunter

Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our ... More

Painting with Fire shows how experiments with chemicals known to change visibly over the course of time transformed British pictorial arts of the long eighteenth century—and how they can alter our conceptions of photography today. In the 1670s, experimental philosophers at the early Royal Society of London were studying the visual effects of dynamic combustibles. By the 1770s, that chemical volatility had become central to ambitious paintings in the circles of Sir Joshua Reynolds, premier portraitist and first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts. Valued by some critics for changing in time (and thus, for prompting intellectual reflection on the nature of time), Reynolds’s unstable chemistry also prompted new techniques of chemical replication among Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and other leading industrialists. In turn, those replicas of chemically decaying academic paintings were rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century and claimed as origin points in the history of photography. Tracing the arc of chemically produced and reproduced art from the 1670s through the 1860s, this book reconsiders early photography by situating it in relationship to Reynolds’s replicated paintings and the literal engines of British industry. By following the chemicals, Painting with Fire remaps familiar stories about academic painting and pictorial experiment amid the industrialization of chemical knowledge.Less

Regarding the Real: Cinema, documentary, and the visual arts

Des O'Rawe

Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, ... More

Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.Less

London Writing of the 1930s

Anna Cottrell

Exploring London's literary identity during the 1930s Anna Cottrell shows how vital writing was to the capital’s booming leisure scene on the eve of the Second World War. The book explores London and ... More

Exploring London's literary identity during the 1930s Anna Cottrell shows how vital writing was to the capital’s booming leisure scene on the eve of the Second World War. The book explores London and Londoners, with a focus on the way in which London's lower-middle-class citizens became inseparable from central London’s leisure scene in the period’s imagination. In contrast with Modernism’s flâneurs and flâneuses, the key figures of 1930s London literature were shop girls, clerks, dance hostesses, and financially insecure journalists whose leisure hours were spent in London’s cinemas, bars, and glittering teashops. Writing about this type of Londoner and her milieus was at the heart of the decade’s experiments in revitalising the British novel, which to many of the period’s writers and intellectuals appeared to lack energy and authenticity. Meticulous description was central to this project of re-energising British writing, and it is in passages describing London milieus such as the teashop and the Soho nightclub that this book locates the decade’s most original and astute meditations on modernity, mass culture, and the value of ordinary lives.Less

Julia Margaret Cameron's 'fancy subjects': Photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire

Jeff Rosen

The Victorians admired Julia Margaret Cameron for her evocative photographic portraits of eminent men like Tennyson, Carlyle, and Darwin. But Cameron also made numerous photographs called ‘fancy ... More

The Victorians admired Julia Margaret Cameron for her evocative photographic portraits of eminent men like Tennyson, Carlyle, and Darwin. But Cameron also made numerous photographs called ‘fancy subjects’ that depicted scenes from literature, personifications from classical mythology, and biblical parables from the Old and New Testament. Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’ is the first comprehensive study of these works, examining Cameron’s use of historical allegories and popular iconography to embed moral, intellectual, and political narratives in her photographs. A work of cultural history as much as art history, this book examines cartoons from Punch and line drawings from the Illustrated London News; cabinet photographs and Autotype prints; textiles and wall paper; book illustrations and engravings from period folios, all as a way to contextualize the allegorical subjects that Cameron represented, revealing connections between her ‘fancy subjects’ and popular debates about such topics as biblical interpretation, democratic government, national identity, and colonial expansion.Less

The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy

Jessica Lake

The advent of the photographic and cinematic camera in the mid to late 19th century caused new harms to individuals (particularly women), which existing laws (copyright, defamation, trespass) were ... More

The advent of the photographic and cinematic camera in the mid to late 19th century caused new harms to individuals (particularly women), which existing laws (copyright, defamation, trespass) were inadequate to address. This book demonstrates that women forged a ‘right to privacy’ in the United States by bringing lawsuits claiming control and ownership over filmed images (still and moving) of their faces, bodies and narratives. At a time when they still lacked civil and political rights, women employed ‘a right to privacy’ to prevent themselves being reduced to nameless ‘pretty’ objects; to protest the transformation of their bodies into spectacles of ‘monstrosity’; to limit their exposure on the big screen to the mass ‘gaze’ of audiences; to control the development of their careers in paid work as models, dancers and actresses; and to reclaim their personal life stories from exploitation by film studios. Case documents also reveal the nexus between privacy claims and arguments by the subjects of images for property rights in them (eventuating in the right to publicity). This book interrogates the gender of privacy law and shows how privacy emerged as an ambiguous claim for women – it both reinforced traditional stereotypes of femininity or womanhood and progressed the feminist aspirations of the New Woman for greater self-determination and self-articulation. It shows that visual crimes against women occurring today via the Internet, such as revenge pornography or non-consensual pornography, have an important legal, social and political history.Less

Revisionary Narratives: Moroccan Women's Auto/Biographical and Testimonial Acts

Naïma Hachad

Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women’s auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond ... More

Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women’s auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond literary texts. It analyzes auto/biographical and testimonial acts in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater performance, and digital media, situating them within specific sociopolitical and cultural contexts of production and consumption. Part One begins by tracing the rise of a feminist consciousness in prison narratives produced and/or published in the late 1970s through the 2000s. Part Two moves to analyzing the ubiquity of auto/biography and testimony in the arts as well as contemporary sociopolitical activism. The focus throughout the various case studies is women’s engagement with patriarchal and (neo)imperial norms and practices as they relate to their experiences of political violence, activism, migration, and displacement. To understand why and how women collapse the boundaries between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary, the book employs a broad, transdisciplinary, montage approach that combines theories on gender and autobiography and takes into account postcolonial, postmodern, transnational, transglobal and translocal perspectives.Less

Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film

Charlotte de Mille

John Mullarkey (ed.)

Bergson and The Art of Immanence is the first book to bring Henri Bergson’s philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art-theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, ... More

Bergson and The Art of Immanence is the first book to bring Henri Bergson’s philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art-theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography, and film. This new collection of essays from world-renowned art theorists, philosophers, and Bergson-scholars will provide both a wide historical context and a rigorous conceptual framework for contemporary art-theory and practice involving the concepts of rhythmic duration, perception, affectivity, the body, memory, and intuition – all of which were given their first systematic theorization in the twentieth-century as immanent objects through the work of Bergson.Less

Travelling Images: Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture

Anna Dahlgren

Travelling images critically examines the migrations and transformations of images as they travel between different image communities. It consists of four case studies covering the period 1870–2010 ... More

Travelling images critically examines the migrations and transformations of images as they travel between different image communities. It consists of four case studies covering the period 1870–2010 and includes photocollages, window displays, fashion imagery and contemporary art projects. Through these four close-ups it seeks to reveal the mechanisms, nature and character of these migration processes, and the agents behind them, as well as the sites where they have taken place. The overall aim of this book is thus to understand the mechanisms of interfacing events in the borderlands of the art world. Two key arguments are developed in the book, reflected by its title Travelling images. First, the notion of travel and focus on movements and transformations signal an emphasis on the similarities between cultural artefacts and living beings. The book considers ‘the social biography’ and ‘ecology’ of images, but also, on a more profound level, the biography and ecology of the notion of art. In doing so, it merges perspectives from art history and image studies with media studies. Consequently, it combines a focus on the individual case, typical for art history and material culture studies with a focus on processes and systems, on continuities and ruptures, and alternate histories inspired by media archaeology and cultural historical media studies. Second, the central concept of image is in this book used to designate both visual conventions, patterns or contents and tangible visual images. Thus it simultaneously consider of content and materiality.Less

Watching the red dawn: The American avant-garde and the Soviet Union

Barnaby Haran

Watching the red dawn charts the responses of the American avant-garde to the cultural works of its Soviet counterpart in period from the formation of the USSR in 1922 to recognition of this new ... More

Watching the red dawn charts the responses of the American avant-garde to the cultural works of its Soviet counterpart in period from the formation of the USSR in 1922 to recognition of this new communist nation by USA in 1933. In this period American artists, writers, and designers looked at the emerging Soviet Union with fascination, as they observed this epochal experiment in communism develop out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. They organised exhibitions of Soviet art and culture, reported on visits to Russia in books and articles, and produced works that were inspired by post-revolutionary culture. One of the most important innovations of Soviet culture was to collapse boundaries between disciplines, as part of a general aim to bring art into everyday life. Correspondingly, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach by looking at American avant-garde responses to Soviet culture across several media, including architecture, theatre, film, photography, and literature. As such, Watching the red dawn considers the putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ by examining the interconnected ways in which Constructivist works were influential upon American practices.Less

A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

Rachel McBride Lindsey

When the revolutionary technology of photography erupted in American culture in 1839, it swiftly became, in the day’s parlance, a “mania.” This richly illustrated book positions vernacular ... More

When the revolutionary technology of photography erupted in American culture in 1839, it swiftly became, in the day’s parlance, a “mania.” This richly illustrated book positions vernacular photography at the center of the study of nineteenth-century American religious life. As an empirical tool, photography captured many of the signal scenes of American life, from the gold rush to the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. But photographs did not simply display neutral records of people, places, and things; rather, commonplace photographs became inscribed with spiritual meaning, disclosing, not merely signifying, a power that lay beyond. Rachel McBride Lindsey demonstrates that what people beheld when they looked at a photograph had as much to do with what lay outside the frame--theological expectations, for example--as with what the camera had recorded. Whether studio portraits tucked into Bibles, postmortem portraits with locks of hair attached, “spirit” photography, stereographs of the Holy Land, or magic lanterns used in biblical instruction, photographs were curated, beheld, displayed, and valued as physical artifacts that functioned both as relics and as icons of religious practice. Lindsey’s interpretation of “vernacular” as an analytic introduces a way to consider anew the cultural, social, and material reach of religion.Less

Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai

Lindsay Shen

Knowledge is Pleasure is the biography of Florence Ayscough, one of the most respected interpreters of Chinese culture of the early 20th century. Born in Concession-era Shanghai, Ayscough developed ... More

Knowledge is Pleasure is the biography of Florence Ayscough, one of the most respected interpreters of Chinese culture of the early 20th century. Born in Concession-era Shanghai, Ayscough developed into an accomplished translator of Chinese poetry, art curator, critic, gardener and photographer. She played an important role in introducing western museums and collectors to Chinese Modernist painting. The author draws on Ayscough’s diaries, private correspondence and published writings to bring to life a woman of great intellectual vibrancy and cultural curiosity.Less

Representing Ethnicity in Contemporary French Visual Culture

Joseph McGonagle

The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the ... More

The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the first book to analyse how a range of different ethnicities have been represented across contemporary French visual culture. Via a wide series of case studies – from the worldwide hit film Amélie to France’s popular TV series Plus belle la vie – it probes how ethnicities have been represented across different media, including film, photography, television and the visual arts. Four chapters examine distinct areas of particular importance: national identity, people of Algerian heritage, Jewishness and France’s second city Marseille.Less

Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice

Kim Knowles and Marion Schmid (eds)

As a fundamentally hybrid medium, cinema has always been defined by its interactions with other art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, performance and dance. Taking the in-between nature ... More

As a fundamentally hybrid medium, cinema has always been defined by its interactions with other art forms such as painting, sculpture, photography, performance and dance. Taking the in-between nature of the cinematic medium as its starting point, this collection of essays maps out new directions for understanding the richly diverse ways in which artists and filmmakers draw on and reconfigure the other arts in their creative practice. From pre-cinema to the digital era, from avant-garde to world cinema, and from the projection room to the gallery space, the contributors critically explore what happens when ideas, forms and feelings migrate from one art form to another. Giving voice to both theorists and moving image practitioners, Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice stimulates fresh thinking about how intermediality, as both a creative method and an interpretative paradigm, can be explored alongside probing questions of what cinema is, has been and can be.Less

Benjamin's Passages: Dreaming, Awakening

Alexander Gelley

In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, ... More

In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” This book examines the figurative status of sleeping and awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project and in Benjamin’s thought more broadly. For Benjamin, memory is not antiquarian: it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. The motif of awakening involves a qualified but crucial performative intention that was central to Benjamin’s undertaking. Benjamin’s passages are not just the Paris arcades: they refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his writings. In tracing these corridors of thought, the book treats many of Benjamin’s most important works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura and image, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.Less

Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics, and the Struggle for the Streets in Chile

Camilo D. Trumper

Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile is a cultural history of the street in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, the hemisphere’s first ... More

Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile is a cultural history of the street in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, the hemisphere’s first democratically elected Socialist president. Santiago became a contested political arena during Allende’s 1000 days in power. Residents across the political spectrum engaged in a heated battle to claim public space and challenge the terms and limits of political contest. Santiaguinos occupied public spaces in ways that appear fleeting, ephemeral, or mundane, but that challenged the sites and forms of legitimate political debate in Chile. Ephemeral Histories studies the tactics of political conflict— marches and protest, posters and murals, and documentary film and street photography—and sheds light on the contours of a public sphere of political debate rooted in urban practice. Street art, for instance, was both vehicle and window into a wider attempt to claim public spaces as a means of reimaging political citizenship. Graffiti, posters and murals might last an hour or a day before they were torn down or painted over, but they allowed a wide range of urban residents to redefine how and where politics was done and debated, and to reimagine the very mode of legitimate political debate in democracy and again in dictatorship. In fact, santiaguinos turned again to ephemeral political practices to rebuild political networks and reestablish political debate after the bloody military coup that deposed Allende on September 11, 1973. Placing urban and visual culture at the center of a story of political change over time, Ephemeral Histories traces the connections and continuities in political citizenship and practice in democracy and dictatorship. It suggests that the regime’s violence did not represent a clean rupture with the past, but a brutal engagement with the history of urban politics under Allende.Less

Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis: Lyrical Representations of Photographs from the 19th Century to the Present

Andrew Miller

Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis is a detailed study of the ekphrasis of photography in poetry since the 19th century. Unlike other critical studies of ekphrasis, Miller’s study concentrates solely on ... More

Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis is a detailed study of the ekphrasis of photography in poetry since the 19th century. Unlike other critical studies of ekphrasis, Miller’s study concentrates solely on the lyrical ekphrasis of photographs, setting out to define how the photographic image provides a unique form of poetic ekphrasis. Moving between the disciplines of semiotics, visual studies, psychology, classical rhetoric, philosophy and literary criticism, Miller outlines what he defines as the chronotope of the photograph. Employing M.M. Bakhtin’s notion of the literary chronotope, Miller argues that the ekphrasis of photographs manifests itself in a series of chronotopic narratives. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to delineating one of these narratives. In this work, Miller engages in a literary history that follows the timeline of photography from its origins in the 19th century to its contemporary digital manifestations in the 21st. The study engages in close-readings of the works of such poets as Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin. In addition, the book does the work of a comparative study, and it goes beyond the limits of Anglophone literature to include the works of such poets and writers as Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Bertolt Brecht, Ernesto Cardenal and Zbigniew Herbert.Less

Awakening the Eye: Robert Frank's American Cinema

George Kouvaros

As the first book-length study of Robert Frank’s work in film and video, Awakening the Eye provides a new account of the career of one of America’s most important twentieth-century artists. Keeping ... More

As the first book-length study of Robert Frank’s work in film and video, Awakening the Eye provides a new account of the career of one of America’s most important twentieth-century artists. Keeping the dual nature of Frank’s career as a photographer-filmmaker in mind, each of the chapters pays particular attention to those instances when ideas and ways of working developed in one media leave their mark on another. By examining Frank’s films in the context of his more widely recognized photographic work, this study stands as a model of cross-media history in which film and photography are viewed not as divergent fields, but as complicit in their search for new forms of visual expression. Awakening the Eye is about the intricate material negotiations that define Frank’s engagement with photography, film and writing; it is also about the artist’s determination to forge a revealing and highly personal connection between the events and circumstances of his life and the material qualities of his work.Less